Do you want the bad news first? Or the worse news?

Do you want the bad news first? Or the worse news?

"We're interested in seeing COBOL as a first-class citizen on .NET and on the Azure cloud," [chief technology officer of application modernization at Micro Focus] said. "Wherever cloud computing is going, we want COBOL to be running there."Taking COBOL into the Cloud? (eweek)

While COBOL is by no means modern, you obviously don't have enough experience in the realm of financial or insurance companies to understand that these mainframe systems are not going away and deserve some focus. MS SQL and/or Oracle could never replace these system, just on sheer cost to re-engineer the setups. Not alone, the amount of money that would need to be thrown at it for hardware and software licensing.

Actually, Chris. My first programming course in college was COBOL. I'm old. I get it: some people don't want to learn new things.

However, it's going to cost "somebody" just as much to keep COBOL alive and add more SOA and cloud support to it as it would to replace it. Somebodies have convinced themselves that it's less risk to do so... but I disagree.

Keeping COBOL-based systems on life support is POSTPONEMENT of risk, not mitigation of it. It's extending the leverage of initial investment to stretch it in perpetuity, not investing new capital in better systems.

Never say never. Companies fail all the time. Even ones that are "too big to fail"... and when it's my turn to buy them and shut them down, we'll replace them with modern systems. Standby.